After year of feuding with towns, Lexington County reinstates agreement to maintain roads
After a year of contention between Lexington County and its municipalities over who would be responsible for taking care of roads in new developments, Lexington County Council called a truce Tuesday by voting to reinstate a longstanding road maintenance agreement it had previously canceled.
Lexington County will return to the previous agreement first made between the county and a dozen cities and towns back in 1978, under which the county provides maintenance for roadways inside the municipal limits.
”This will reinstate the longstanding 1978 roads agreement with each municipality” in the county, Lexington County Council Chairman Todd Cullum said in introducing the measure Tuesday.
The county council voted to cancel that agreement in December 2023 as part of a dispute over differing rules for new development in the towns and surrounding county, a tension point as Lexington County has struggled to manage an explosion of growth in recent years. County leaders said they did not want to take on responsibility for new roads if municipalities allowed for denser development than county rules would have allowed.
The county offered to renegotiate a deal individually with municipalities that would provide for stricter rules on development — but many municipalities balked and instead called for the old agreement to be put back in place.
Some County Council members were reluctant to return to the agreement after attempting for a year to move away from taking blanket responsibility for new construction in the county.
“Their density is different from our density,” said former County Council Chair Beth Carrigg, who had been attempting to negotiate new road coverage with the holdout towns. “More housing units means more traffic on the road, which means the road deteriorates faster.”
She said Lexington County attempted to placate some cities’ concern by creating an “urban” overlay district allowing for denser development covering the area around Cayce, Springdale and West Columbia, the more developed eastern side of the county.
“If the county is going to be responsible [for road maintenance], it is not unreasonable that we have some communication and understanding in what those setbacks and lot size and regulations should be,” Carrigg said.
But Cullum said the county unilaterally canceling its existing agreement had become a hindrance to having those kinds of conversations with Lexington County’s cities, and that local governments should ultimately be allowed to set their own rules.
“These are our municipalities. They’re not foreign, they’re in the county,” he said. “Traffic doesn’t know to stay in town or in the unincorporated areas, the roads are all contiguous.”
Charli Wessinger, who represents the fast-growing Chapin area, said the county should put a time limit on the return to the old agreement, to give the municipalities an incentive to reach a new deal with Lexington County. She noted that all roads covered by the 1978 agreement remain under county maintenance and only noncompliant new construction would be affected.
“Come to the table and work out our differences within a certain timeframe, and then we can revisit that every five or six years,” Wessinger said.
But Cullum said a time limit would mean “going back to where we started.”
Cullum said Tuesday’s motion was requested in a letter from Hazel Livingston, the mayor of Lexington, which had remained adamantly opposed to what leaders there saw as the county overstepping and dictating how the town could grow moving forward.
“The prior agreement served us well for over 40 years,” Livingston wrote to Cullum after he was elected council chairman two weeks ago. “It’s essential that all residents have equal access to County Road maintenance through a standard agreement, no matter the size or location of their municipality. It wouldn’t be fair for some residents to receive fewer services for the same tax dollars they contribute, simply because of where they live.”
Livingston told The State she welcomed the return of the roads agreement but was still willing to talk to the county and come to an understanding on how best to handle development in the future.
“I don’t think it’s about one having control over the other one. It’s about coming together as a group, inside and outside the municipalities,” she said.
Carrigg and Wessinger both voted against returning to the agreement at the committee stage Tuesday, but approved passage at the full council meeting later in the day.
“Since we voted to terminate, a lot of hard work went into trying to negotiate what is in best interest of Lexington County, and we failed,” Carrigg said. “We have three new members [of County Council] who think they might get us further, so I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt.”
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